It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Forget the partridges and the pear trees, the yuletide season is customarily marked by a flurry of big-push, major-label pop releases. Joining this year’s festive run-up of Girls Aloud, Shayne Ward and ‘star’ of ‘Corrie’, Richard Fleeshman, is über-pop minx Kylie and it’s safe to say her comeback (tenth) LP will help fill a fair few stockings come December 24.
And deservedly so. It’s never been Kylie’s job to mark benches, so it’s daft to expect radical invention, but ‘X’ delivers plenty of genuinely dizzying, gee-wow moments, even if they do come via the audacious plundering of (in descending proportional order) Goldfrapp, Madonna, Daft Punk, Sophie Ellis Bextor, Swizz Beatz and Neptunes, Beyoncé, Christina Aguilera and Kelis. Every track is a canny cut-and-shut job (the huge production team includes Guy Chambers, Calvin Harris and Richard ‘Spice Girls’ Stannard) but who cares, when the results are as brilliant as ‘No More Rain’ (a brazen lift from ‘Black Cherry’), ‘The One’ (an homage to Erasure) and the Serge Gainsbourg-sampling ‘Sensitized’, all of which have ‘single’ stamped on them more plainly than a pair of Bridget Jones’s underpants.
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5 comments
This is a f**** great album. I should say most of (newly?) Kylie fans who sttop begging for a Fever part II. Don't you all think that in 20 years of a successful career Kylie has the chance to choose which songs will the final cut or which sound to record in her own albums?. We, the fans, have to proudly wait what she offers to us. And if you don't like the offering, as me in her Body Language, put it on the shelf until her next one.
The production on X is awesome, hyper technology filled, incredible tracks, except for Heart Beat Rock, quite a filler, but many potential singles. Wow is great, it grows on you but you can't deny it's a guilty pleasure song.
Enjoy this album!
Yawn! Kylie should have moved on from this stuff 10 years ago. It's the same old highly-sexualized, man-pulling, dance fluff she was churning out then. Only difference is the boys in the mixing room have been given such free reign that her voice is on occasion so electronically altered that it's virtually unrecognizable. I used to enjoy some of Kylie' early stuff, guess because I was in my 20s then too. But we grow up. And Ms Minogue's music hasn't. I guess the pop princess fluff sells and that's what it's all about, but will she ever be seen as a serious musician? Maybe she's left it too late with this offering...
i actually love 'wow' and for it to be the next single has a lot of potential. it taps into some SAW grooves while giving us a taste of Daft Punk happiness. Although I don't think this is the best album of her career, I do believe it takes her back on the path of where FEVER left off. oddly though, X is laced with a lot of synths and sounds from BODY LANGUAGE but without the r&b in every song. X is a sweet surprise and a very tasty groove feast! Even if we have heard it all before. And for what it's worth, i loved 'nu-di-ty' - that has a right to be a catchy and campy single in its own right. I didn't care for Speakerphone and Sensitized, which I beg for them not to be singles.
This is a vast improvement on her last studio album, Body Language. In My Arms, The One, No More Rain and Like A Drug are all brilliant potential single choices, but I disagree with Ed P. Wow is a wise choice as the next release. Following from the mixed reception to 2 Hearts from her fanbase, launching the poppiest sounding song from the album is a wise decision. This is afterall where Kylie's roots lie.
The only track that doesn't quite work is Nu-di-ty with no real hook...Having heard some of the great tracks which were bypassed in favour of this (Lose Control, When The Cats Away, In The Mood For Love, Spell Of Desire), you can't help but wonder how this made the final cut.
Spot on. This is the best album of her career. My favourite is Like a Drug, but In My Arms, Speakerphone, Sensitized, The One & No More Rain are fantastic songs (and should be singles). I heard 'Wow' is the next single. My reaction? "Wow that's a REALLY bad choice"!!!